They say that home is where the heart is.

Home is, of course, where family is. It is supposed to encompass all that is comfortable and familiar, and a place where one goes to receive love and support. Unfortunately, when it comes to major life decisions, familial support isn’t as readily available as some would hope.

Big decisions like becoming a vegetarian, coming out, or even something as simple as refusing to wear leather, often spark a lot of controversy in families. An adult child opting out of a practice that they grew up with is a source of confusion for many parents.

In an ideal world, a young adult’s life decisions that stray from a parent’s views would still warrant their support, simply because the parent is supporting their child. A gay friend of mine once told me that he didn’t come out until he was ready to give up his family because there was a chance they wouldn’t support who he was. While my big decision to become a vegetarian didn’t require me to give up my family, it did cause some conflict.

I’m not the only one to feel the pressure, though. In Chinese elementary schools, students are pressured by their parents to compete for class government positions in ways that would make Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman blush. In a video clip on the New York Times’ website, students who couldn’t have been older than eight years old were encouraged by their parents to resort to brutal tactics to psych out the competition, including taunting, bullying and outright lies””which teachers allowed. Kids who considered dropping out of the race received comments from their parents like, “Are you out of your mind?”

On an even more drastic scale, Eunjung Kim, a psychologist at The University of Washington, conducted a study on Korean-American teenagers that measured their self-worth with connections to their relationship with their parents. Using two separate questionnaires that assessed what the students thought of themselves and what they thought of their parents, Kim found that the teenagers with low self-confidence often had low levels of maternal and paternal warmth. Similarly, he also found that teenagers who had poor relationships with their mothers had low levels of psychological adjustment. The conclusion of the study was that a parent’s love was important in a child’s psychological development, backing up Kim’s parental acceptance-rejection theory.

On the other hand, rejection is a two-way street. Some kids, no matter how loving and warm their parents are, ask for rejection. Teenagers, famous for their ability to get in their parents faces and demand respect after making stupid decisions, really just demand rejection from their parents after picking at what makes them tick.

For those of us adult children, however, the decisions we make that our parents don’t approve of shouldn’t be a root cause of rejection. Whether the parent rejects the decision or rejects their grown-up child, understanding and support should come into play on both sides. It doesn’t matter if you come out of the closet, change your diet or switch your major””the ability of parents to at least respect the decision their adult children makes is essential if they want to continue to have a good relationship with them.